“Another detail that kept bothering me was how I managed to get soot on the sleeve. I would’ve had to reach into the fire, but why?” At his intentional silence, I square my shoulders. “Then I remembered seeing it drop to the bottom of the fireplace. I reached in, but it was too hot. When I stood to grab the fire poker, there was a cufflink sitting right there on your mantel. Not the one that I brought with me from the crime scene. Not the one that I had put in my pocket before the attack, that was then burning through my bloodstained jeans. But the matching cufflink to the pair.” I take a breath to fill my lungs. “And I realized as I stared into the flames…in a solitary moment of terror…it was all too convenient. How easily you went along with the staging of the scene. How you spurred me on to kill him. How you made me an accomplice.”

I knock over the box. The contents of the third Harbinger crime scene spill across the rug.

“I asked you if you were the Harbinger killer,” I say, my chest rising and falling quickly. “I looked into your eyes, past the blood and mask of a killer, and I said you weren’t the Harbinger. You never corrected me.”

He tilts his head to the side. “You didn’t want me to.”

I huff a derisive breath. Kneeling down, I pluck out the one piece of evidence that, the moment I spotted it, stopped my heart. Angling the printed picture toward Kallum, I point to the foreground. “You were framing Wellington as the Harbinger killer.”

The picture was taken that same day while I was photographing the scene. In the background of the image—once zoomed in—is a man dressed in a stylish, all-black suit with distinct, identifying tattoos marking his hand.

“You were there,” I accuse him. “First you stole Wellington’s cufflinks, then you planted one at the third crime scene. It had the college insignia and his initials. Once discovered, it would’ve been easy to trace the evidence back to Wellington and name him the prime suspect of the Harbinger killings.”

Kallum licks his lips, and a faint smile twists the corner of his mouth up. “I’d offer a slow clap but—” He yanks at the handcuff to emphasize his bound state.

“The best I can figure, you were on your way to plant the other cufflink in Wellington’s car when you stumbled across me being assaulted in the parking lot. But that raises another question: why not just leave the cufflink behind after the murder in the first place? Why chance returning to the scene of the crime later?”

He doesn’t look away, waiting for me to string the connections on the figurative murder board.

“The evidence couldn’t be recovered too quickly,” I say, reasoning. “You had to make sure that investigators were on the scene first. Specifically, one person you wanted to find that evidence. Only, I wasn’t supposed to go to the campus alone. I wasn’t supposed to show up at night, ruining your scheme.”

“That did throw a tire iron into the plan.” Kallum smirks arrogantly. “Luckily, the universe had a far better plan for us.”

“Ha, yeah. The universe.” I nod slowly. “The universe didn’t do any of this, Kallum. You did.”

He shrugs a shoulder. “Sometimes the universe needs a little help.”

“Where is it?” I demand. “Where is the cufflink? The one that I left behind in your fireplace when I ran out of your townhouse after I realized I’d killed an innocent man.”

“Innocent is a stretch for Wellington.”

I clench my hands as I try to control my rapid inhalations. Eventually, I did recover most of my memory from that night. By the time I made it back to my hotel room, shock and sleep deprivation wreaking havoc, I buried everything into a filing box, thinking I could bury my guilt. It wasn’t that I had killed a man that shattered my mind; it was that I had killed an innocent man.

And I had done so with the Harbinger.

“While you never cease to impress me, sweet Halen, you’re still missing a key piece.”

I lift my chin defiantly. “And that’s exactly what I came here to get.”

But first, I have to understand the madness of the man.

I sit in the leather chair across from him and look over into the fire. “Wellington was always a part of the equation, just not as the actual killer. He was supposed to be the scapegoat. You always have to have a scapegoat. So in order to solve the equation, we have to have the unknown variable.” I lock with his severe gaze. “Me.”

He captures me with that irresistible smolder, and I hate how it affects me, how my heart squeezes. I stand and pace the room, my gaze cast down at the floor, letting my thoughts take me back to that moment with Kallum in the killing fields when he brought up the Harbinger case.

“Atropos, Lachesis, and Styx,” I recite. “Three species of the death’s-head hawkmoth. All from the Greek mythos, and all associated with the underworld, with death. When I said the species of the moth was irrelevant to the Harbinger case, you made sure to point this out to me, that the Acherontia moth is an omen of death.” I glance up at him. “I didn’t understand what you were trying to tell me at the time, but I do know you never say anything randomly. There’s always a reason.”

As his gaze roves over me, a sly smile brightens his features. “God, you’re brilliant. No one else could’ve put this together, Halen.”

“I keep trying to understand why you chose the moth, why you devised such elaborate, macabre scenes, how they connected to Wellington. I just couldn’t understand your reasoning, so I went back to the Harbinger letters. They were too vague, some obscure riddle. At first, once I linked the victims to Wellington, I thought they were only meant to denote his doomsday. That’s what the authorities were supposed to glean from them, right?”

The setup looks like Wellington was killing off people who could hurt him financially and career-wise. Kallum is, quite literally, a genius. His victim selection process was meticulously tailored to Wellington, a gift wrapped package for law officials to make their case.

“Care to elaborate?” I prompt him.

“Only if you whip out the sharp objects so we can put these cuffs to good use.”

At my refusal to be baited by his charm, Kallum shifts his gaze to the flickering flames. “It was like it was predestined,” he says. “Percy Wellington set himself up the first day he walked into my lecture hall. He laid the foundation for the Harbinger in that room, with his ideals and talk of doom.” He smiles to himself. “Percy was already a monster. I just gave him a moniker.”

I shake my head. “But that doesn’t explain the letters, Kallum.”

He reacts to my use of his name, his throat working to force a swallow.

“What were the letters⁠—?”

“They were love letters.” His gaze snaps to me as his words compress the tense atmosphere to a point.

My throat tight, I swallow past the torrid ache. “To me,” I say to clarify. “They were love letters to me.”

He nods once.

My thoughts drift back as I recall what Kallum said to me that night in the marsh, when he opened himself up about his fear of losing me: All risk poses a threat of ruin. If you want to destroy me, don’t take your next breath. His wording was just similar enough to the phrasing in the Harbinger letters.

“You were always trying to tell me,” I say as I swipe my hair from my vision. “The letters were about me, an omen for my future doomsday. My death.”

Devyn said I would figure it out—and I thought she was the delusional one.

“To prevent your death, Halen,” he says, offering further clarity.

“I still don’t understand how⁠—”

“Yes, you do.”

And somehow, I do. Because to follow that lead, we have to go all the way back to the very first moment I laid eyes on Kallum Locke—to the moment we almost met.

A year prior to that fateful night, in the university courtyard, as I stood there laughing with my parents, I glanced across the quad and my gaze connected with his.